Brian Cox has a genius response to a climate-change hater!

LOL, I love PuffHo headlines. Here, His Highness Brian Cox throws serious shade on a climate-change denialist. This tweet is from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Q&A” show which just featured Cox on a panel which includes an elected Senator, Malcolm Roberts, who’s also a climate change denier (Aussies, please tell us who this clown is).

When the politician denied temperatures were rising, Cox pulled out a NASA graph to demonstrate the data. (It’s like pulling Marshall McLuhan from behind a sign in “Annie Hall”). Roberts then claims the supposed rise in temperatures reflects a conspiracy, and Cox notes the difficulty of getting virtually every scientist in the world to conspire as part of the same hoax (that, by the way, is also what creationists believe about us evolutionists.)

And why on earth would scientists want to cook the data anyway? Creationists think evolutionists conspire because the rotten foundations of evolution help prop up our atheism, but what’s the reason for the collusion among climate scientists?

True, but I would expect it be a bit more heated on “Real Time” than the discussion between Cox and Roberts, only because that’s so often how it goes on Bill’s show. Lot’s of yelling by each panel member over the top of the other panel members. It’s grand fun, but I thoroughly enjoyed this clip as well, which was much more restrained.

Not maybe – there have already been a number of such encounters on Real Time as Bill Nye, Neil DeGrasse Tyson or someone else tried to educate a conservative panel member. Ken is right that it often is more heated, but not always.

Yes, and this chap’s ridiculous denial views are just like nearly the entire GOP in this country. One thing that should be said of this ignorance on the part of the GOP is – their basic reason for denial, besides cutting into their love of fossil fuels is that any real effort to do something about climate change requires a large national effort. The GOP is always going to be against anything that requires federal government to be involved. Not sure who the hell they think pays for the roads and bridges but who knows.

A main talking point for the GOP is that the federal government is incompetent and useless to achieve anything so just elect us and we will prove it to you.

“The GOP is always going to be against anything that requires federal government to be involved.”

Oh, they’d sure like us to think so. And they say as much often enough. But, the truth of their actions is much nastier than their anti “socialist” keep government out of everyone’s business rhetoric portrays.

The truth of their actions is that they’ve got no problem increasing government spending, debt, size or giving government more authority to “get in peoples’ business.” As long as it is in service to advancing their goals of course. And their goals are, as adduced by their actions, to allow the top few percent to rape and pillage everyone else without consequence and with no apparent thought to how that affects the goose that is laying their golden eggs.

To simplify, the GOP is for big government for the purposes of screwing nearly everyone over, while the Democratic party is for big government for the purposes of keeping things running reasonably well and perhaps even improving things for everyone a little bit.

I know exactly who is the first one (a close – by – blood [only] – actually) family member (brother’s facebook – page posts just humiliate me those are .that. awful !) to verifiably earn such a nom de plume !

A nom de plume for him — even if one just coming from me, the sister to whom he (formerly, a USA – pilot dropping napalm on little ones all over a Viet Nam landscape), has not spoken one repeatable word, quite literally I mean to state, since his walking away from my pacifist stance against his … … December 1970.

Indeed, the technology is already in use on toll roads and bridges in many places.

The issue of cost-disincentives to fuel and energy use affecting the poor disproportionately is a real one but I do think that some measures to incentivise lower energy use are needed. We can’t just rely on technological advances in vehicle design as that is too slow to bring about the changes required.

Incentivising car-sharing and public transport are potentially ways of reducing transport related fuel use without disadvantaging the poor. Also incentivising walking and cycling by designing city centres that make these safe and practical (which has an additional benefit of promoting public health). It is striking how the number of cyclists you see varies enormously from place to place so some cities are able to get this right.

Reblogged this on My Garden Biodiversity and commented:
To those in denial re all things natural, everything is a conspiracy. I don’t need a scientist to tell me all is not well the climate. It, like them, is totally confused. Rest assured, that it will sort its self out, with, or without human aid. More importantly, it will take no prisoners in doing so. World leaders take heed for you have the power to help nature out, continuing to ignore the warnings, the facts, has dire consequences for all, act now, for its close to the point of no return!

It is a shame that dialogues like this are not common on US TV. I think that given some time they would have a positive impact and I think they would be reasonably popular.

If people are able to see, on a regular basis, how silly these types of arguments and the people who are using them are compared to responses like Brian Cox’s here it would have a positive impact. Nothing will get through to some people but there are many people who are just swept along with their peers and others that are fence sitters and many of those types could probably be persuaded towards reason.

The reason I have heard advanced by denialists, to explain why the world’s scientists would all collude to commit fraud against the public by fabricating evidence for climate change, is that if you are pro-global-warming you get funding, you get published, etc., whereas if you are anti-global-warming you do not get funding, do not get published, etc. Which is a difficult argument to really answer convincingly, because it has a grain of truth – denialist cranks do, in fact, have trouble getting funded and published. Of course that is because they are *wrong*, not because there’s some grand conspiracy; but how would you convince a denialist of that?

I really don’t know how accurate that is, but an answer may be to point out that every legitimate climate experiment and study is an attempt to disprove the hypotheses the experiment or study is based on. In a very accurate sense climate experiments and studies are an attempt to disprove global warming.

But, with many denialists it doesn’t matter whether or not your arguments are good or not. You aren’t going to make a dent no matter what.

It would not be difficult getting funding if you had a credible research result that was surprising.

And frankly, private corporations could easily fund such ‘mavericks’ if they wanted. Heck, Shell alone made $8 billion last year, while the NSF spent $6 billion (total; that’s across all fields, not just climate change research). They mostly don’t because their scientists are telling them the same thing.

I don’t think I feel ashamed (perhaps I should) but I certainly feel disappointed and somewhat outraged.

And once at a book launch a judge (perhaps retired) declared that the Liberal Party was in fact neither liberal nor conservative, and I think he had it pretty right. The Liberal Party (and hence governments that it might be part of) is a collections of factions, some liberal, some conservative, and rarely receives a majority of votes to rule in their own right but must form a coalition with the National Party who represent the interest of farmers and have been called (not inaccurately) the Country Socialist Party on occasion.

Hard core climate-change deniers understand that the earth is getting warmer — the scientifically literate ones do, anyway — but are convinced they must manipulate the data to sow doubt to prevent those who lean left from using it to undermine the free-enterprise system. This subject was explored at length in the book Merchants of Doubt.

Re: “And why on earth would scientists want to cook the data anyway? Creationists think evolutionists conspire because the rotten foundations of evolution help prop up our atheism, but what’s the reason for the collusion among climate scientists?”

Alas, some right wingers think it is to spread socialism and to kill the capitalist free market. Recently, Rush (to-judgement) Limbaugh in response to NASA finding water on Mars insisted “You know they will find some way to use this to justify the left wing agenda.”

(Free market absolutism in the USA is largely a phenomenon that arose after the Soviet Union. Hardly anyone was that absolutist about it in the 19th century.)

“But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy…One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy any more.”- Ottmar Edenhofer IPCC

“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution” – Christiana Figueres UN FCCC

“This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.”- Christiana Figures UN FCCC

“Frankly, we may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse.” – Maurice Strong UN

“What if a small group of these world leaders were to conclude the principal risk to the earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? In order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring this about?” – Maurice Strong UN

I’m assuming you know who these people are or, in Strong’s case, were.

I am definitely familiar with Maurice Strong, an oil businessman prior to becoming an ardent environmentalist.

There remains a problem however of correlation and cause and effect. Examine a parallel case. In short, most B are A does not mean most A are B. In the 1990s, I had a debate with a conservative student at Kent State, who argued that because Communist organizations were participating in anti-Vietnam war protests, the protests must in general be engineered and and orchestrated by the Communist Party. This does not follow at all, any more than the fact that most Buddhists are vegetarian means that most vegetarians are Buddhists.

First, A two paragraph digression closer to home to illustrate the principle in general.

It is true that virtually all atheists are convinced of Darwin’s theory of evolution- but it is not the case that a large majority of believers in Darwin are atheists, nor is it the case that Charles Darwin had any kind of anti-theist agenda. IN particular, Richard Dawkins is on record as saying Darwin makes atheism much easier but does not really make atheism necessary. So one can not credibly argue that evolution is motivated by an atheist agenda, even if atheism is aided and abetted by Darwinian teaching.

Similarly, a large majority of atheists (unless they are also libertarians) tend to be politically fairly liberal in the tradition of John Dewey. However, 78% of the elected Democratic officials in America identify as Christian (regardless of what Ted Cruz says about Christians having no place in the Democratic party.) Currently 30% of Americans identify as Democrats, while only 7% identify as atheist or agnostic. The Democratic party is a coalition of secular humanists, labor, advocates for various minorities, yet Ann Coulter fallaciously writes a book arguing that liberalism is an inherently atheistic philosophy motivated by atheism, which would come as a massive surprise to John Locke, of the major philosophical founders of liberalism.

Obviously, people who deeply dislike the Industrial Revolution are going to find fodder for their New Left views in the science of climate change. But to argue against the veracity of climate change on that basis is in part the fallacy of argumentum ad consequentiam (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_consequences)

The first suspicion that climate change could be human caused was in the 19th century when the greenhouse effect was first identifies. As early as the 1960s, it was realized that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was dramatically rising. By the 1970s, organizations like the “World Meteorological Organization” were slowly becoming convinced of possible global warming. The WMO is not a bunch of radicals, nor is NASA (an institution I proudly worked for for two non-consecutive years.)

In particular, NASA has NO political motivation to fudge the data on climate change, and their figures are easily verifiable from independent sources such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, etc.

In short the simple existence of an anti-industrialist New Left which is (for obvious reasons) ecstatic about the findings of climate change does not in any way show that the science itself uses fudged data motivated by a desire to tear down industrial civilization, any more than Communist participation in anti-Vietnam War demonstrations shows they are the prime movers of same, or the atheist satisfaction with Darwinian evolution, shows that the theory has a naturalist anti-theist motivation.

I’m not arguing for or against any climate issues; merely to show examples of how some people might have acquired the notion that it is about changing/destroying capitalism.

Climate is a system that is not yet well understood in all its complexity and I
don’t claim to understand it well enough to speak about it. However the notion that NOAA (not NASA) has made many retroactive changes to its global temperature datasets is well-founded. Whether these changes are legitimate is a matter of opinion – some informed, some not.

“Whether these changes are legitimate is a matter of opinion – some informed, some not.”

Are the changes in data sets you are talking about the adjustments made to temperatures derived from data recorded from different types of instruments, by various methods, at different times and places throughout the history of the data set, in order to make the temperatures in the entire data set comparable?

The legitimacy of those changes is not merely a matter of opinion. It is a bog standard, very common issue in science across disciplines and the methods of dealing with it are a necessary part of any study that derives data from various types of instruments under various conditions.

Sure, everybody has opinions and anyone can certainly have an opinion on this, but opinions based on ignorance and bias aren’t valid. If people don’t understand the science, how it was done and why it was done the way it was done, then why should their opinion be given any consideration in determining the legitimacy of the changes?

That reality is messy and difficult to understand, even seemingly straight forward things like measuring temperature, is unfortunate but that is not a relevant reason for global warming deniers to hang onto their bogus opinions about the science they either can’t or refuse to understand. Often even after thorough explanations are made available to them.

Malcolm Roberts is the Orcish War-Clown of the Apocalypse. Sort of like Donald Trump’s political persona, without the expensive suits, without the billions of dollars, and with much less public support. Maybe one or two more dingbat ideas than Trump. And, unlike Trump, he is a true believer in all the nonsense he utters.

He represents Queensland in the Senate for a right wing racist party called “One Nation”, a party run by the openly uncomprehending Pauline Hanson*. They are anti-globalisation, anti-environmental legislation, anti-immigration, dedicated to the proposition that Australia is a Christian Nation, and want a Royal Commission into Islam to prove that it is not a religion. They have a very white washed dream of a (non existent) 1950’s golden age of Australia, which they want to bring back.

They’ve got four seats in the current senate, mostly because our Glorious Leader, the Silvered Clown of the High Tech Apocalypse, called a double dissolution election, which meant that Senators only needed half the votes they would normally need to get a seat.

————
*Her look of frozen blind puzzled bovine panic, while uttering her terrify war cry of “Please explain”, stopped many an interviewer dead in their tracks.

In 2013 he wrote a ‘paper’ debunking AGW insisting that it lacks any empirical evidence.

He included a graph plotting athe 12 month running average of atmospheric CO2 levels at Hawaii (the famous Keeling curve) against the 21 running average of southern oceanic surface temperatures, which showed a perfect straight line correlation, which he claimed proved that global warming causes increasing CO2 levels. Actually it’s very good empirical evidence that increasing CO2 levels cause global warming.

His fixation on southern oceans is because of the sawtooth increase in the Keeling curve – lower in the northern summer, higher in the northern winter, which is due to plants taking down an enormous amount of CO2 from the atmosphere during the growing season, and plants and animals releasing it again in winter.

He reckons it’s due to the colder southern oceans absorbing more CO2 during winter and the warmer southern oceans during summer releasing. Maybe – if the southern atmosphere mixes rapidly and completely with the northern. And the northern oceans have no effect on atmospheric CO2 levels.

He also thinks the 30-40 billion tonnes of CO2 humans are dumping in the atmosphere has no influence on atmospheric CO2 levels.

I let a few typos through – his graph was actually a 12 month running average of atmospheric CO2 levels (which removes the annual variation due to seasons) against a 21 year running average of southern oceanic surface temperatures (to remove variation due to solar cycles, El Niño/la Niña events and volcanic eruptions).

For each point on the graph the average CO2 level is calculated for the preceding 12 months, then the average southern oceanic surface temperatures is calculated for the preceding 21 years. Because atmospheric CO2 levels are increasing, the 12 month running average of CO2 is just a substitute for time. And it’s a documentation of global warming. Roberts insists it isn’t.

I would guess the U.S. is the only one that is giving it a try at least part of the time. How well is it working…that would be a not working. The favorable term they use now is privatization. It almost sounds like profitization. We will privatize what is profitable and throw out the rest.

Please dont blame us for voting in this loonie
He received just 77 votes and got elected due to the crazy upper House voting system.He only got in because he is a member of the righ wing “One Nation”party which is the receiver of “preferences” from other parties and will accept anyone who wants to be a member which hopefully will bring about its demise. (Its too compicated to explain even if I could understand it.He is an ex coal mining executive which explains his desire to sell more coal.

Roberts then claims the supposed rise in temperatures reflects a conspiracy, and Cox notes the difficulty of getting virtually every scientist in the world to conspire as part of the same hoax

I’ve worked for a number of different government agencies. None of them NASA (sadly), but I have been in the delicious situation of having a conversation with a conspiracy nut unaware of my background, talking some conspiracy about my current employer, and being able to respond “I work for [x], Bob. Am I part of the conspiracy?” Then comes the fumbling, mumbling excuse. Oh no, not you. Its the other guys… The schaudenfreude, it satisfies. 🙂

Apparently, conspiracies follow George Carlin’s theory about drivers (and a certain appellation that will not fit with Jerry’s family friendly site): The amount of a, um, conspirator a person is is directly proportional to the distance they are away from you at the time you talk about them…

Roberts is a weirdo of the first order.
He thinks the (Australian) government is trying to control us through the use of punctuation. No, I’m not joking.
Roberts is in the same bunch of anti-science, anthropogenic global warming deniers as Ian Plimer, David Flint and Lord Christopher Monckton.
If you can stomach some really ‘out there’ stuff, you can read more about Roberts by searching for the Galileo Movement’s website. Galileo would be appalled.
Australians have just been condemned – by the casting of just 70-odd votes, which is all Roberts needed to get a Senate seat – to live in more interesting political times.